


Gold thread

by frimfram



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, F/M, First Time, Ichor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 12:40:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18778483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frimfram/pseuds/frimfram
Summary: Basically I found "...bloody hot in here" a bit wonky, even if it was very endearing, so this is an alternate J/B first time in the aftermath of the Long Night.





	Gold thread

Proof of life comes in the smoke. 

In thin and ordered plumes it begins to rise, not foul and drifting from the charnel-pyres of the battlefield but steadily from Winterfell's chimneys. In all its strange squatness, its snow-smothered austerity, the place endures. Men have lived, men and women, to stoke disciplined fires in the grates, to raise the water for the great washing-clean all this draggled company requires. 

They barely speak as they marshal limping columns of survivors to the least-breached inner courts of the great house, as they drag heaped corpses from the least-soiled inner rooms. The bloodied count the dead. From an unfrozen well water is drawn. Fat begins to spit over fires. Sleep tempts aching limbs, but with ears still ringing from the night none can face its oblivion. They see morning come, flat and sickly on a blank, low sky, before exhaustion follows it, and a strung-out northern lad leads Ser Jaime and Ser Brienne, eyes lowered, to an intact inner room where braziers light the walls and steam rises from a tub. 

They are not the first to use it; wet footprints mark the flags and the water is dark as soup, but they ache to sluice this rime of death from their skin, and as they pull the armour from their limbs they feel themselves return to their bodies. The air in the room shimmers with their not watching one another as they undress. But then it's done, and, naked, they find themselves this time strung up by an absurd decorum, by having forgotten "After you." For a moment both stand frozen by the single bath. The words to reconcile it all, chivalry and need, have not survived the night. 

Brienne steps into the water wordlessly and sits, sliding to one side. Then she brings herself to look again at Jaime's face, an unreadable expression on her own. "There's no other tub." 

Outdone by Harrenhal. A ghost grin wracks Jaime; he half-nods. Then he steps into the bath at its far end, wordless, facing her. 

By the gods, the steam is a salve. They both exhale at once. Every inch of skin reports the warmth of the water, its satisfaction, a balm and a scouring and a cure. The water finds out the wounds the battle has exacted even as it laps away their blood. Eyes on the water, Brienne takes one of a pair of cloths slung across the tub's brim and swipes it down the column of her neck, swabbing away a trail of soot and blood. Gilded briefly by torchlight, water drops pool in the dip at the base of her throat, then trail down into darkness once again. 

Jaime swallows. He takes the other cloth, lowers his good hand beneath the surface. A hiss escapes his teeth. A deep rend marks the flesh of his wrist, gaping round to the back of his hand, down as a deep as a white flash of bone. Amid the half-set blood black ichor clings, clotting around a yellowed something that looks horribly like a tooth. The angle of it sets Jaime wrong. He wedges the wash cloth in the crook of his other arm and tries to swipe the wound against it, but the pain makes him suck his teeth and the cloth falls limp into the dark water. 

"Let me." 

Jaime looks up. 

Brienne holds her hand out to him. Quick and unsentimental, she reaches across the small gulf dividing them, takes the cloth and dredges it, then wrings it out and with deft swipes cleans the wound. She takes Jaime's hand in hers and with a sharp movement plucks out the thing, the grit or tooth. 

To mask the pain an urge springs up in him to make a joke: which swordsmen he might yet match should he lose this hand too; how many more teeth he might have broken had the dead bared them at the other -- but as he looks up into Brienne's face the impulse founders in his chest. Because she is looking back at him, frank and clear, her face golden in the low light, and her eyes sear him with their plainness and their challenge. 

And by the gods he wants to quake. For a moment he's struck helpless, by the purity of her skin even where it blooms with forming bruises. By the clarity of her eyes. _There should be ceremony_ , some pathetic courtly pulse in his chest demands; there should be light, and costume, and circumstance and nobility. They should have met in a better world. Instead there's this: just this, all this, the black water around them, the burn in their bodies and their blood. The crackle of the torches on the walls. There's the echo of their battle, the gold thread of their victory beneath the filth. With his hand in hers he sits transfixed, and he breathes, and he breathes her in. And it is she who moves. 

In the thinning steam, in the blackening water, the ghosts that hem them in dissolve. She is not an avatar of nobility, an icon of honour; she is not purity and knightliness projected into the world. She is warm flesh. She is alive. She is Brienne. And at the tips of his wounded fingers the pulse at her throat jumps and jumps and jumps.


End file.
